Connecting with Customers – Part 2

Last week, I talked about using Loyalty Programs in Counterpoint to keep customers coming back. Another way to keep them coming back is to stay in contact with them. Most of you have probably heard of Constant Contact – it’s an email marketing program. But you have to keep it up to date with email addresses and pick the customers you want to send a specific email to. What if you could have something that connected directly to your Counterpoint database? What you need then is Customer Connect. An email marketing program that pulls information directly from your customer database.

Enter you customer’s email just once in Counterpoint and it will be populated in Customer Connect. No double entry. Then you set the email campaign you want to send and it will look at your database and pull the customers that meet the campaign specification and send out the marketing piece you have put together.

Some of the more popular ones are:

Welcome email – whenever a new customer is entered in Counterpoint they get a Welcome email from you. Maybe you want to offer them a discount to come back in.

Haven’t See You In A While – Setup a campaign to look for customers who haven’t bought anything in a specific amount of time – email them and offer them a special to come back in.

Happy Birthday – get your customer’s birthday – either date or month and put it in a profile field. Then at the beginning of each month sent out a Happy Birthday greeting and tell them to come in a get a present from you.

Sales – having a sales on specific product(s)? Setup a campaign for that and Customer Connect will search you database for customers who have bought the product(s) in the past and email them that it’s going on sale.

The great thing about this is, for most campaigns, you can set them once and schedule multiple periodic future runs. You don’t need to do anything other than the initial setup. If your customer gives you their emails, birthdays, favorite color, animal’s name, kid’s birthday and whatever else you dream up – they will be expecting emails from you.

I know if works for me. Every August when my birthday rolls around, I start looking for those emails that say I get a free ice cream cone or a discount at a store I shop at. It gets me back there to spend my birthday money!